Walking in the city is as old as cities themselves. Most of the world's urban inhabitants have usually gotten around on foot and, consequently, have mainly experienced their cities as pedestrians. What a famous architect notes of classical Greek cities has been true of most urban life until well into the industrial era: Man was compelled to walk through a whole complex of buildings and live within them in order to achieve his end. This end has traditionally included not merely physical mobility but also social and cultural goals; as observed, traditional streets tend to act both literally and metaphorically as exterior rooms in the city. They function as places as well as links. No matter what the image of the street, it has always included a set of assumptions about who should own and control it, who would live on it and use it, the purposes for which it was built, and the activities appropriate to it. Walking in the city has thus been from the start a complex human act.
Masjid Jamek is situated where both rivers the Sungei Klang and the Sungei Gombak meet. Right at this very place has the history of Kuala Lumpur started. This is the very spot for KL's history, where the early settlers built their shacks. In the 1850s, early miners would unload here their equipment and provisions. They would then trek up the jungle path to Ampang, where they would dig for tin. This graceful, onion-domed mosque, designed by British architect Arthur Benison Hubback, borrows Mogul and Moorish styles with its brick-and-plaster banded minarets and three shapely domes. It was built in 1907 and officially opened by the Sultan of Selangor on 23rd of December in 1909. It remained the city's centre of Islamic worship until the opening of the National Mosque in 1965.
The Houhai Bar Street, in the famous Shichahai area of Beijing, is a place where traditional Chinese and western culture hits. When the first bar opened at a common Siheyuan (四合院, quadrangle courtyard) in the area in 2000, there were only approximately a dozen of bars in the Shichahai area. Three years later, a cluster of bars, restaurants and cafes surged in the area within half a year and now over 120 ones welcome visitors from all corners of the world every evening.
